“The fundamental tenet of capitalism, which holds that some bad companies need to fail to make way for new and better ones, is being rewritten,” says Alan Bloom, global head of restructuring at Ernst & Young. “Many European companies are just declining slowly and have an urgent need for new management, a revised capital structure or at worst to be allowed to fail,” he adds.

"The governor says the disappointing recovery in the economy has been due to three factors: the squeeze in real take home pay, the deleveraging of the banks, and the crisis in the eurozone. Note that there is no mention here of the UK’s fiscal tightening, or the size of the multiplier, which others would want to emphasise.
This is all familiar territory, but the governor has been developing a new strain of thought in recent months, and this has come to fruition in this speech. It is that quantitative easing is becoming less effective, because it has worked by bringing forward economic activity from future periods, rather than by boosting the underlying level of activity over the long term."

"Mario Draghi has laid out his vision for the euro and European Central Bank. While 2012 was “the year of relaunching the euro”, he said 2013 was the year of implementation. Believing the hard work still needed to save the euro as absolutely worth it, he laid out the steps still needed. Notable was that these were essentially political and, if it comes to pass, the ECB can rather put its feet up and watch others do the heavy lifting this year.
What does he want?
First, continued fiscal consolidation – front-loaded to regain market confidence, concentrated on current spending, not increased taxation or public investment cuts.
Second, structural reforms. The focus on supply side action has become very attractive to central bankers because it removes any obligation to raise demand themselves. Mr Draghi sees supply side reforms as increasing competitiveness, exports and jobs. He was not specific about policies, nor how quickly he expects them to affect growth and jobs.
Third, no change in the ECB’s framework to maintain price stability, which he said was sufficient. Commenting on the Federal Reserve’s attempts to steer private sector expectations towards investment by committing to keep policy loose until unemployment falls below 6.5 per cent, he said: “We have given plenty of evidence that we can do the same within the existing framework”.
So apart from sitting back and relaxing and watching his prediction that calmer financial markets will be reflected in a restoration of eurozone growth in the second half of year, what is on his agenda? The most concrete thing was building the capability of the proposed single supervisor of banks in Frankfurt."

"Western economists were scathing in their criticisms of Japanese policy.
I was one of those critics... And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize. ...
The ... West has, in fact, fallen into a slump similar to Japan’s — but worse. And that wasn’t supposed to happen. In the 1990s, we assumed that if the United States or Western Europe found themselves facing anything like Japan’s problems, we would respond much more effectively... But we didn’t, even though we had Japan’s experience to guide us. ... And Western workers have experienced a level of suffering that Japan has managed to avoid.
What policy failures am I talking about? ... Japanese fiscal policy didn’t do enough to help growth; Western fiscal policy actively destroyed growth.
Or consider monetary policy. The Bank of Japan ... has received a lot of criticism for reacting too slowly to the slide into deflation, and then for being too eager to raise interest rates at the first hint of recovery. That criticism is fair, but Japan’s central bank never did anything as wrongheaded as the European Central Bank’s decision to raise rates in 2011, helping to send Europe back into recession. And even that mistake is trivial compared with the awesomely wrongheaded behavior of ... Sweden’s central bank, which raised rates despite below-target inflation and relatively high unemployment, and appears, at this point, to have pushed Sweden into outright deflation. ..."